The Industrial (Marketing) Revolution: How Technology Changes Everything for the Industrial Marketer

By Jared R. Fabac

The industrial marketing sectoralso known as business-to-business marketing continues to rely on traditional advertising, marketing, and promotions to reach customers. But the old ways dont work anymore, and its time to revolt. Jared R. Fabac, a renowned marketing expert, outlines the new technology, tools, and platforms that can help you participate in the revolution. He also outlines the dire consequences that could befall the companies that cling to the ways of the past. In this guidebook, youll learn how to

Transform your marketing for todays audience;
Get found by the buyers you target;
Convert more prospects in shorter time;
Put your lead generation efforts on autopilot

New technology, social media and other marketing and promotion platforms demand that companies in the industrial sector not only keep up with, but surpass their competition in this new environment. Putting your head in the sand while business deteriorates or doubling down on old methods wont help you beat competitors and remain relevant. You can only do that by recognizing that technology is here to stay and deciding to join The Industrial (Marketing) Revolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475998498

Jared R. Fabac

Jared R. Fabac is an industrial marketing expert and has been featured in trade journals such as MBA Magazine and Inside Business. He is certified as a business consultant through the Small Business Administration and holds numerous other industry certifications. One Fortune 100 manufacturer called him “the Salvador Dali of marketing” for his ability to visualize market opportunities in the industrial sector. He is a partner in the leading digital agency Idea Bright Marketing and currently lives in Virginia.

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Part

1

The Industrial Marketing Revolution

Chapter 1

Lead, Follow, or Show Us the Way—The Death of Traditional Marketing

Imagine what it must have felt like to early factory owners at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. To watch production exponentially explode overnight, to have all your employees gathered in one location versus piecemeal all over town, to set standards for quality, and meet those standards with direct supervision—all under one roof. To set higher standards and meet stiffer deadlines and increase market share by market dominance.

Much like the Industrial Revolution forever changed the way manufacturers produced goods, the Internet has completely and irrevocably changed the way we produce something even more important to modern consumers: information.

The web has not altered the marketing landscape simply because we’re all addicted to the buzz and hum of modern technology. Instead, society is becoming increasingly addicted to technology and, thus, the Internet because it is the quickest, most effective, and simplest form of gathering information to make more informed decisions about available products.

All marketing is information—and every development since the Internet came into the marketing vernacular—is another step toward more information, easier and faster. The Internet provides more information about you, your company, your brand, your products, your services, and your success.

If we look more closely at traditional industrial advertising, we can see that it, too, was an early means of research:

• Trade shows: For decades, trade shows were a leading source of information for B2B consumers and, quite often, the first leg of a fact-finding tour that led them straight to a particular product and/or vendor. Today the Internet is playing that role more than ever. It is now a live, 24/7 trade show where those in need can find your products and fully evaluate them before making a purchase.

• Direct mail: Brochures, catalogs, and other pieces of direct mail let potential buyers learn valuable information about your products in the most attractive, modern manner possible. Now we call that a website; rather than remaining on the printed page, product descriptions and images are becoming fully interactive by integrating specifications with product overviews. Websites are also giving users the ability to quickly source specific products without having to surf through hundreds of pages.

• Trade journals: Appearing in a trade journal gave industrial marketers a wide, targeted audience for their product, be it in print advertising or being featured in an article or editorial. Blogs, white papers, e-books, and other editorial—and original—content are quickly replacing the slower, limited editorial pace and space of trade journals. Content is no longer an appealing accommodation to products; it is a necessity expected by the sourcing end users.

Research Redirected

If you look at all marketing as some form of research in a sales-driven cycle, it should come as no surprise that speed (through faster access to information through the web) beats tradition every time. In the past, buyers seeking industrial products followed a set pattern of research and fact-finding before spending their company’s money. Generally speaking, they pored through printed material (catalogs, brochures, and trade journals). They queried colleagues and coworkers about Company A’s widgets or Company B’s wires, adding word of mouth and personal referrals to the data they’d already gathered in print. At a certain point, they would call your toll-free number and begin the process of ordering from you, eventually completing the cumbersome and lengthy sales process.

Analytically speaking, modern buyers are no different from traditional ones; they have simply short-circuited the traditional method to do more research—faster and more effectively—online in order to make more accurate decisions based on their needs.

Your website—or your competitor’s website—has become a veritable 24/7 trade show complete with product descriptions, photos, specifications, and possibly even reviews, endorsements, and demonstration videos. What was once only accomplished through a planned face-to-face engagement is now being accomplished faster and more efficiently than ever.

A host of resources on your blog, including white papers, special reports, and e-books provides them with drill down data to make better, more informed choices, faster.

Review sites, Facebook, Twitter, forums, and other social media hot spots have taken the place of phone tag for most buyers, and they can be performed at any time with the click of a mouse. No voice mail or phone tag is required. E-mail has become the primary form of communication in almost all industrial offices throughout the world.

The process is essentially the same: research + fact finding + peer review = buying decision. The only difference now is the speed of the process and the tools one uses to complete it.

Trade Shows and Traditional Advertising

Are Suffering

According to the 2008 Tradeshow Week Exhibition Management Survey, trade show attendance dropped in excess of 25 percent. These declines have been contributing factors in a number of national shows becoming regional—and some shows combining with others.

The trade show industry has been continuously trending downward the last few years, with a more precipitous drop late in 2008 and into Q2 of 2009. The Tradeshow Week Quarterly Report of Tradeshow Statistics reported a sharp decline in Q2 2009 in two indexes it tracks: attendance was down 10.4 percent, and the number of exhibiting companies decreased by over 13 percent. Both of these indexes showed declines from Q1 2009. Trade show statistics have been steadily decreasing ever since.

With travel budgets and in-person trade shows are on the decline, virtual trade shows—hosted completely online—are on the rise. Two major providers of trade show services report record growth this year.

The number of ad pages in printed business publications continues to plummet. Total ad pages in business-to-business (B2B) publications fell more than 30 percent in the first half of 2009 compared to the same period in 2008; some publications suffered more than 50 percent declines in ad pages.

And virtually every title tracked by Interactive Media Services showed losses of 20 percent or more in ad pages for Q1 2009 compared to Q1 2008. The subsequent loss in revenues has led to some B2B publishers to sell their print publications, but few are finding buyers. Other publications are reducing publishing frequency.

However, this decline in ad pages and revenue is not a surprising trend: due to the migration of your audience online, the printed advertising industry was struggling even before the economic recession.

A Shift toward the Future

As goes the rest of the country, so goes the industrial segment of our industry. Many general trade magazines and newspapers are slowly dying off, such as the Baltimore Examiner and the Rocky Mountain News and Gourmet, Vibe, and Teen, and so are such specialized industry publications, such as PC Magazine, Pilot Journal, and Training Magazine.

It’s more than a trend or a downturn; it’s a national, even global, shift in how we gather information. Print magazines, newspapers, and heavy industry trade journals and periodicals can’t compete with the instant, almost real-time, flow of information that appears daily on websites, blogs, forums, and other web-based resources that supply us with the information we need to make decisions.

The lead-time for an article on a print editorial calendar can be four to six months; thanks to the Internet, the same information can appear in four or six hours—and certainly within four or six days.

With the rise of iPads, Kindles, Nooks, and other mobile- and tablet-driven technology, readers can get the same instantaneous content in an interactive and attractive format that closely mimics the pages, even the layouts, of print publications but in a more vibrant, dynamic, and immediate way. And they are—in droves. According to Media Daily News, Out of 187 million American adults who interacted with magazine content and ads in the period covered by the AMS, 54 percent did so via the web or mobile platforms, including smartphones, eReaders, tablets, and other mobile devices.

As long as the content has quality and is relevant, it’s hard to resist faster and better over just plain better.

Managing Your Media Mix

Another seismic shift to accompany the Industrial Marketing Revolution is the rapid decline of paid advertising. With On-Demand television and movies, viewers can easily fast-forward through the commercials—or avoid them altogether with subscription-based services like Netflix and Hulu.

In print media, such as magazines, trade journals, and newspapers, the new cry for industrial marketers will be their media mix. Consumers are still reading print, but they’re often accessing it online through tablets, laptops, and even cell phones.

According to Nielsen’s Connected Devices Playbook, On any given weekday, 70 percent of iPad owners spend at least 15 minutes with magazine content on their devices, with 33 percent spending between 31 and 60 minutes.

This media mix—the stickiness of printed material sending readers online and online readers being driven back to print—will be crucial in developing your future social media campaigns.

Measurement at the Speed of a Mouse

One of the reasons traditional marketing is becoming less effective is that industrial marketers are finding online campaigns and social media interactions easier to track. The effectiveness of print advertising, trade shows, and other traditional means of marketing your products is further hampered by a decided lack of means of measurement.

Online metrics, such as website traffic that can be narrowed down into lead conversions, which can be narrowed down to new customers, gives marketers the power to allocate marketing dollars to areas that are generating revenue more accurately than ever before.

While it might take months to determine whether appearing in a particular trade journal was effective, you can know immediately how many visitors, leads, prospects, and customers a recent campaign is generating; if it’s not comparable to previous efforts, you can switch gears or change tactics within days or hours. This gives companies a new form of adaptability, which is becoming crucial for remaining relevant in today’s market.

This immediacy of reporting is allowing those who take advantage of the industrial marketing revolution to pull ahead of their more traditional counterparts by making faster, better informed marketing and promotional decisions.

The Mass Marketing Migration

If there’s one big lesson for marketers in this recent turn of events, it’s that the old forms of marketing have been underperforming for quite some time now and should not be tolerated as the primary part of your all-important media mix.

To stay loyal to a trade journal or direct mailing company because you’ve been doing business with them for decades is charity, not capitalism. If an advertising stream has dried up, don’t keep going back to the same well; instead, try to find a new (revenue) stream!

As a marketer, you must be prepared to think differently about your approaches to connecting with customers, prospects, and markets. Even before our recent economic problems hit, marketing was steadily trending away from traditional media, such as printed trade journals and in-person trade shows, and toward interactive web media, such as online search, e-newsletters, virtual events, and banner advertising. Today, content-based assets are critical elements to any successful marketing campaign. Throw in social media, and we’re in the midst of a true revolution.

This mass marketing migration is steady, ongoing, and nearly complete, and it is always evolving and becoming more powerful. Your target audience has already begun migrating online to find you; as social media grows and traditional media continues to struggle, they are in no hurry to leave.

But more than where they are, we need to understand why they are there. Here are a few statistics that demonstrate how the behavior of your customers and prospects has changed:

• More than 80 percent of engineering, technical, manufacturing, and industrial professionals use the Internet to find components, equipment, services, suppliers, and product specifications. And 73 percent spend three or more hours per week on the Internet for work-related purposes. Your audience is online; you need to be there to connect with them.

• Four of the top five resources that technical professionals use when searching for products, services, and suppliers are online resources: general search engines, online catalogs, supplier websites, and online directories. The only non-online source to make the top five is peers/colleagues.

• Engineers and other technical professionals prefer web-based content to printed trade magazines as an information source. Over the past twelve months, 30 percent have reduced the use of printed trade magazines, continuing a documented trend over the past several years. However, 56 percent receive three or more e-newsletters, and 46 percent read e-newsletters at least daily or several times a week.

If It’s Not Marketing as Usual, What Are Suppliers Doing?

Few, if any, experts expect the old ways of marketing and advertising to ever truly recover in the wake of new media. Even advertising agencies see the writing on the wall.

According to AdWeek, Experts say agencies will not be able to simply return to business as usual. Some will be better positioned to grab a greater share of spending than others, say industry watchers, and those with the edge will be the ones that can optimize the use of digital media.

The article goes on to point out that most new media marketers will rely on a portfolio of marketing and media vehicles, allowing them to reach with greater precision and greater accountability than they ever had before.

On the supplier side, many manufacturers have already adopted the new reality of online, social, and interactive marketing. According to the recent survey, Trends in Industrial Marketing, 30 percent of industrial marketers are reducing trade show attendance—and 38 percent are reducing print ads. What is taking the place of these traditional media? For 48 percent, online marketing has become a greater portion of the marketing budget.

In addition, three of the top four sources of leads for manufacturers in are online programs: company websites, online sourcing directories and search engines, and e-mail marketing.

Measurement and Accountability Are Here to Stay

With the steadily dwindling ROI of traditional media, the measurement of marketing effectiveness is fast becoming a priority across all industries, but particularly in manufacturing and production. It continues to command increased attention as executives demand accountability from marketing, and measurement will remain a mandate as online numbers swell and marketing is the beneficiary of more investment, not less.

Manufacturers recognize the need for marketing measurement; in a recent survey, they strongly agreed with this statement: There is greater pressure to demonstrate accountability and return on marketing investments.

Like most companies, manufacturers resist investing marketing dollars without knowing what they are getting for their return, but the effectiveness of print ads, trade shows, and other forms of traditional marketing have always been difficult to measure.

Now more than ever, manufacturers are closely evaluating the performance of marketing programs, reducing or eliminating those that don’t perform well, and choosing marketing programs that are measurable.

In response to these changing times, 69 percent of manufacturers will closely evaluate the performance of marketing programs and reduce or